Le Wagon

Hello, My name is Clemence and I have never been into "long studies". That's why, I naturally turned myself towards bootcamps when I decided to learn how to code.

I had been looking through all the different bootcamps for months before I decided to apply to Le Wagon. At first, I hesitated because I thought it was only designed for entrepreneurs which was not really my profile. But quickly I realised that I could apply without having any current entrepreneurial project.

After taking the interview, asking questions and having completed the ruby track, I got accepted in the Batch#43 in Paris which took place from October to December 2016. 

The team I joined was the first girls-only team at Le Wagon. The project we built is called ZA:DL ( http://beta.zadl.fr/ ). ZA:DL is a web-app that helps you organize paid activities with your friends.

After Le Wagon, we kept on working on it for 2 weeks as the leader of our team plans on releasing it during Q1 of 2017.

There is no denying that the atmosphere at Le Wagon is awesome. The people in my batch were super cool and everybody was getting along well with each other. Teachers, teaching assistants and the staff are all very nice and ready to help when needed. The events organised during the bootcamp were great as well. Despite getting more and more tired throughout the weeks, the talks with entrepreneurs, the Q&A sessions with alumni were very appreciated by the whole group.

Although the first few weeks were really hard for me as I had never coded before, the 9 weeks spent at Le Wagon were so great, and went so fast that no one wanted it to end.

Before joining the bootcamp I had no coding related background whatsoever. I had a Master's of Laws degree and at my latest job I was working as a B2B Account Manager. I decided to take a completely different path and learn how to code! 

Le Wagon is a 9 week intensive bootcamp and the beginning was tough! However, I worked hard, attended every minute (and more) and with some help from my classmates I stuck it out to the end. The syllabus is really well structured, so that even beginners can comprehend it and learn the foundations of web development. 

The course has a really practical approach, so in the end we were educated to build fully functional web applications. All the teachers and TAs were amazing and they did their best to make us understand all the theory much better. If someone needed a boost, they would take extra care of them. 

During the final 2 weeks we were working in teams in order to design, code and ship to production our very own products (www.like-minded.tech). The 9 weeks are intense but I loved every moment of it - the lectures in the morning, the challenging exercises, my different buddy each day, the teachers and the TAs, my teammates, our lovely manager Ed, the masterminds behind Le Wagon, the Friday drinks! At the end of the bootcamp I didn't want to leave! Thanks, Le Wagon!

After getting a Law Bachelor and graduating with a MA in Media & Communication, I just couldn't picture myself starting the usual internship process for big companies in old industries. I was also always excited by the fast moving tech industry - but so frustrated to not be able to be a part of it. 

When I came up with my business idea, it got to the point where all the brainstorming and market research was about to be left hanging if no product was actually being built… After getting a pricing estimation of what it would cost to code my MVP - and knowing that even then I wouldn't be able to fully understand my own product - I decided to invest that money in myself and acquire tech skills.

I spent hours comparing the different bootcamps out there and eventually chose Le Wagon because of what I heard from friends in Paris and because they are the only one really focused on building your product.They have proved it with the successful entrepreneurs they have helped so far. 

The experience at Le Wagon London was truly amazing. The staff (teachers, managers, directors) are as close to the students as it can get and are always available to help you out even after hours. The platform on which we exercise is one of a kind: you start the day with a lecture where the new concepts are taught with the teacher live coding and explaining everything they do; then you spend the day working in pairs or teams and going over the concepts of the day (and more advanced techniques for those who can); and you end the day with another live code where you go over everything once again. It's just crazy the amount of stuff you learn and you surprise yourself keeping the pace with everything and getting better with the days. 

I made good friends there and met my amazing team with who we are now improving our sports competition generator and manager (OnTop). It is now going so fast and we are already able to test it right after the program. 

Finally, I really recommend taking this course for any aspiring entrepreneur (regardless of your background), but also for anyone who wants to commit for 9 weeks to a life changing experience that will open you more doors that you could dream of. But it doesn't end here because you're part of Le Wagon for life.

After finishing my business school in France I knew I wanted to work in a startup environment. But I felt like the knowledge I learnt in the past 4 years was very theoretical and strongly lacked the technical skills to actually bring something to the table in a company other than just an extra pair of hands to help out. 

Having done an internship in a digital startup during my studies I had seen what developers could do and "coding" kept intriguing me since then. That is why after graduating I decided not to do a masters degree as most of my friends were doing and instead I decided to learn how to code at Le Wagon's bootcamp in London! I was amazed by it's online reputation, specially on the international scene compared to other bootcamps I was looking at.

The course was intense, as I expected it to be, but I was amazed by how well the structure of the course was. We would spend all day learning how to code and doing exercises without losing focus. Unlike my university classes, where I often lost focus after 30 minutes of a lecture. 

The last fews weeks the classroom felt more like a company office as we all worked in teams to build our final projects, this was an incredible experience, we quickly got very passionate and proud of our projects, meaning we'd voluntarily spend late nights trying to make our websites look perfect or adding extra features. Before we knew it we were building fully functional websites in just a couple of days.

And that's how, thanks to Le Wagon, in just a few weeks I learned how to code and completely changed my career path and my way of thinking from business to web development with a business perspective.

First of all I totally recommend doing Le Wagon bootcamp if you are keen on entering the programming world.   Before doing Le Wagon last winter here in Brazil I was kind of worried about my future and having a hard time finding a good job. I have studied and worked with oceanography here and before the bootcamp I was disappointed with the lack of opportunities in my field, I spent more than a year looking for a job and nothing came up.   Work with programming was something that I always thought about, but the initial learning curve was very discouraging. So coding bootcamps were already in my mind to break through this curve. Then I heard that a really good bootcamp was landing here in Brazil, so I thought it was my chance of changing. I ended up being the first student to enroll in the first brazilian batch.   And let me tell you it’s been an amazing experience, I have met really good people and looking back I still cannot believe how much me and all my colleagues could learn in only 9 weeks. This is the most interesting point where Le Wagon stand out, it's a very well structured and crafted program. And it explains how they manage to have anyone learn so much so fast.   Their philosophy is learning by doing, and that's also another diferenciating fact about them. You really get your hands dirty and « squeeze »  your brain. The last 2 weeks are devoted to a project which teaches you how to work in team and release a functional project in only ten days. Some of my teammates are still working on the project that is turning into a startup called numooh. Check it out!   Two months after I finished the course I’ve been involved in some freelancing dev for a nice French startup and just got hired in another major startup here in Brazil. (Gympass, the netflix of gym club :)   So, in my opinion, if you seriously want to dive into this world with a solid understanding of what’s going on. You should consider Le Wagon.

Before joining Le Wagon I was student in Amsterdam. At the time there was no Le Wagon in Amsterdam so I decided to go for London as it's a real tech hub. 

When I signed up, my thought process was that I'd learn to code for fun and go back to Amsterdam to do my Bachelors. But I was very wrong. Le Wagon London has changed me forever. I really did not see myself wanting to continue my career as a developer but the skills you leave with give you such freedom with your life. 

The teacher's enthusiasm is infectious. The program made me realise in the first week that I had made one of the most meaningful decisions of my life. I am now confident that I have full control of my future, and it's an empowering feeling.

I feel confident in an interview situation and look forward to the future. Now I will have life long access to Le Wagon's platform, the ever growing alumni community and will have the support forever.  

After working 10 years at Apple in various roles from finance, operations and sales I realised how little I knew about the tech side of the business and decided to take on the challenge of learning how to code. 

Following discussions with friends and reviews online I joined the first batch of Le wagon in London (batch#36) this summer.

I'm still amazed by the amount of information that we managed to cover in only 9 weeks, these were probably the fastest 9 weeks of my life !! I went from not knowing what css was to being able to code an MVP in 2 weeks. 

In my view it's important to join and be part of a community rather than any course, as this will give you access to an amazing amount of content and great people, during and after your course and this is exactly what the wagon is, a great community.

It took me two years to pluck up the courage to quit my job to do a coding course. I was working for a design agency in London and although I knew early on that building websites was what I wanted to do – forfeiting a steady income to learn how to do it was a hard decision. As I became increasingly frustrated with outsourcing our designs to freelance coders (where the brief was rarely met and almost always past the deadline), I decided to take the plunge. I put a lot of time into researching, speaking with and visiting the various universities and coding bootcamps and Le Wagon came out top. 

One of Le Wagon's most appealing aspects was the perfect balance of lectures, self-learning and pair-programming. Some courses rely heavily on lectures (where I would have most definitely lost concentration) and others solely on pair-programming and self-learning (where I would have fallen behind). An hour and a half's lecture each morning gave us a proper introduction to the topic of the day and a good understanding to be able to tackle the pair-programming that followed ('buddying’ up with a classmate and working through problems together). At the end of each day ‘live code’ either consolidated what was learnt that day, revisited areas students had difficulty with or introduced a new topic ready for the next day. This structure was brilliant as it not only taught us to work as a team with a new person each day, the lectures either side kept concentration levels high and, as a result, in two months of 9am-7pm there wasn’t a single moment in which I wanted to leave early or take some time out.

Le Wagon appealed to each student's reasons for being on the course – whether you enrolled to learn to build websites in general (like me), or to develop and build one particular idea, or of course to learn to code in preparation for working in the newest tech start-up / taking over the coding world. We were taught in such a way that each of us could work to our strengths and with the incredible daily support from tutors and assistants, and indeed fellow classmates, I don't think anyone ever felt like they were drowning. I knew I was never going to be the best in the class at the ‘back-end’ side of things, essential as they are, but I knew if I could understand how it all worked together that my ‘front-end’ design skills would prevail. 

Since finishing in September, I have been freelancing building websites for businesses – everyone I meet seems to want a website or knows someone who does. Working for myself has been a life-long dream and after only two projects I paid for the course that got me here. The daunting prospect of going it alone has been made infinitely easier by Le Wagon’s amazingly tight community and incredible resource of lectures, guidelines and live-recordings from the course, which I will have access to for as long as I am coding. 

Having run my own company in Switzerland for the last 8 years I wanted to join Le Wagon London to expand my digital entrepreneurial skills. My business, Label Bleu, distributes fresh food produce direct to our customers in Switzerland. We currently employ our own dev team (regiomag.net), which programs our backend in Ruby, and I really wanted to learn more so I can communicate clearly with them and ultimately grow Label Bleu digitally. 

London is a hotspot for tech and Le Wagon's office is located right in the heart of it, surrounded by awesome startups. The whole course is very intense. We are absorbing new information everyday. By the end you cannot imagine that in only 9 weeks you're able to build your own products from scratch. 

In the last two weeks, my team and I built an extension to Label Bleu. A platform to harness our huge community and engage them socially through sharing their own recipes and photos. We will soon be launching this part of the business. 

I absolutely loved my time at Le Wagon and have since developed new skills to help grow my business. I am coding everyday and am able now to code for my comapny. It was a life changing experience and amazing to present at Google Campus on Demo Day. I will have access to the platform for ever and be part of Le Wagon's family. 

Thank you to the whole LeWagon team, the quality is excellent and I have no regret. 

My idea to join a Coding Bootcamp goes back way before I heard about Le Wagon. My first contact with Le Wagon was in an TechCrunch article and what really impressed me the most was the synergy between 'coding' and 'entrepreneurship’. With a background in finance, I felt learning to code would be valuable and also help me get involved in the startup scene.

The decision to dive into a bootcamp is not an easy one -the value is huge, but the investment money/time is also considerable.

After a few days at Le Wagon batch #28 in Lisbon I realized my investment was a smart one.  I really felt the time and money put into the program was being invested back on me from everyone involved.

Two months have passed since I finished my bootcamp and I am already working as a software developer in one of the most promising economic data platforms on the web. I found out that the most valuable thing I took from Le Wagon, is not the specific skills I learned there, but the understanding that if i put 120% of myself into something in 9 weeks the amount of knowledge one can gain is incredible.

 

Seriously, if you are in doubt, just do it.

Why did I choose Le Wagon coding bootcamp in Copenhagen?

 

My background

I’m a classically trained “corporate ninja” within the disciplines of business administration and marketing. Since the world is becoming more and more digital I wanted to add digital skills to my tool belt. More specifically I wanted to learn how a digital product is developed from scratch and how the development process is organized. I researched options for coding schools that would offer short-term coding courses but they were based abroad and I was looking for a “local” solution. When I found out that Le Wagon was opening here in Copenhagen Denmark I knew I had to join. Hence I enrolled in the 9-week bootcamp in summer  of 2016.

 

Why Le Wagon

I did a lot of research on Le Wagon prior to joining it. What really sets Le Wagon apart from the rest is the entrepreneurial focus: you get the chance to develop your own product and think like an entrepreneur. This was a perfect match with my business background, since it was building on top of my existing knowledge base as well as expanding into unknown territories (well, hello coding!). Having a full stack curricullum that takes back-end as well as front-end into account was exactly the combination I was looking for with my zero skills in coding. Furthermore my research also showed that Le Wagon was highly recommended and scored very well on ratings. That’s why I chose it.

   

The bootcamp

I was part of the very first Copenhagen batch of Le Wagon. One word that sums of the whole 9 week experience: excellent! The teaching was great since we had people who were professional developers and knew exactly what they were talking about. The teachers were highly competent and professional. Not only were we presented to new knowledge every day, we learnt how to apply it to exercises that  were really challenging - but strengthened our understanding of the concepts. Every day you built up your skills brick by brick. The first 6 weeks really gave you the necessary skill set and was the best prep for the last stretch of the bootcamp: two major projects in the remaining 3 weeks.  We  created our own Airbnb clone ( platform was similar) while the second was our own app idea. Being able to go from having absolutely no coding skills to create sites that actually look like something worthwhile is quite cool. You literally see how much you progress every week and that just motivates you keep on learning and coding.

Besides all the new knowledge the social aspect is just as good. These 9 weeks are probably the most challenging you experience but the social aspect of it makes it even more worthwhile. You have a lot of fun during these 9 weeks. Even after 12 hours of coding every day we would go out for burgers or beers in the evening. And we stil meet even after the bootcamp is over because you are Le Wagon buddies for life (we really are!)   

     

Pros

You learn a lot in 9 weeks. The amount of knowledge you get in these 9 weeks is massive. But you also learn to apply the knowledge in an actual, practical sense. You start viewing and evaluating digital solutions that you see everywhere.  

 

Copenhagen. It’s a beautiful city that’s really open and young. Give it a try. You will love the biking and social life of the city.

 

Start of your coding journey. You really get a solid foundation to learn even more after the bootcamp is done.

 

You understand how a digital product is developed. Although the projects of the bootcamp are of miniature-scale the core methods of structuring the development processes are the same in the real world.

 

Reshape your career. Having the digital understanding as above mentioned makes you even more interesting for a future employer. I can vouch for this because it led to my new job within IT project management.

 

The social aspect. You have a lot fun while your brain is frying because of all the new concepts it’s trying to absorp.

   

Cons

You learn a lot in 9 weeks. At times you would lose track of which concepts you covered in the previous week because there is a lot to cover. I recommend that by end of each day you reflect on the key concepts you learnt.

 

Not for the faint-hearted. Learning how to code is challenging. At times you will feel frustrated because you just aren’t getting it. It’s important that you come with an open mind and accept that sometimes it takes a bit more time for you to learn it. But eventually you will.

 

I've been interested in computers and technology since I was young, but I never had the push or guidance to actually start coding. I played around with some less technical stuff and loved it, but decided to study clinical social work. A move abroad to Denmark made it hard to continue in my previous line of work, so I thought it was the perfect time to dive head first into coding. It just so happened that the first batch of Le Wagon Copenhagen was a few months away, so I committed.

Le Wagon Copenhagen was on of the best experiences of my life. I quickly realized that there so many factors that can affect an experience as intense as this. The fact that you are spending so many hours a day with the same people, curriculum, and teachers learning something that feels unfamiliar and abstract is demanding. Le Wagon is great because it meets all of these challenges. The curriculum is great, the teaching informative, and most importantly, the environment is positive and supportive.

At Le Wagon, you learn so much in 9 weeks. While Le Wagon does have a strong focus on teaching the skills for entrepreneurs to pursue their business ideas (you even pitch app ideas, vote on them, and then build them), there is a lot of flexibility in what you can focus your time and energy on. For example, you can really dig into more advanced concepts like sorting algorithms and metaprogramming, but if that sound boring, you can spend time on many other things like UX, design, or wireframing.

This course really is for everyone. Whether you've never done coding, you want to build your own app, or you've tried to learn to code and feel stuck, Le Wagon will help you with whatever tech direction you want to go. Also, Le Wagon has done a tremendous job of creating a consistent level of rigor and quality in all of its cities, and Copenhagen is no exception.